20130526

IKEA disobedients

IKEA Disobedients, an architectural performance by Madrid-based
Andrés Jaque Arquitectos, was recently acquired by MoMA. The
international premiere of the performance at MoMA PS1, part of the 9+1 Ways of Being Political
exhibition at MoMA, reveals how recent architectural practices utilize
performative actions to engage audiences with architecture in a
non-traditional way.

The performance takes place in a setting made of IKEA-hacked pieces and
invites neighbors in Queens to reenact their politically-charged
domestic activities. According to Jaque, the performance suggests
disobedience to the lifestyles proposed by brands such as IKEA,
proposing "an urban counter-notion of the domestic" instead—one that
discloses how politically active citizens can and do act outside of the
privacy of their homes. Excerpt text: MoMA

...Each of the nine participants...were selected
on account of how their own domestic lives exist apart from the
professed "norm". Whether through activism or entrepreneurship these
individuals are bringing social and political actions into the personal
sanctum of the home. Throughout the two performances each performer will
go about the social actions that routinely take place within their own
homes, from providing haircuts and food to discussing the nature of
their own ideas about what a contemporary domestic idyll encompasses.
The audience is encouraged to participate and interact within the space
and voice their own thoughts on the idea of the home as not a neutral
space but one where "controversy and disagreement (can arise) at the
site where affections may also emerge..." Excerpt text: MoMA PS1

gutai: splendid playground

“Don’t imitate others!” and “Engage in the newness!” are just two of the
signature slogans of the Gutai Art Association, founded in July 1954 by
Jiro Yoshihara. The Gutai—which translates to “concreteness”—artists
dared to breakthrough the boundaries presented by traditional Japanese
art. As their name suggests, the artists directly engaged with concrete
materials (such as remote-control toys, sand, light bulbs, and paper
screens) to create a new, never before seen, kind of art. The creative
genius of these avant-garde artists manifested itself in the form of
various mediums including, but not limited to, painting, installation
and performance art, experimental film, and environmental art. Gutai: Splendid Playground
explores the works of these artists, created over a span of
two-decades, and features an enormous installation by Motonaga Sadamasa
composed of a series of plastic tubes filled with colored water. The
structure, created specifically for the Guggenheim’s rotunda, invites
visitors to look up and use these “brush strokes” to create their own
individual composition.

body and light

Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body Taken at Ten Inch Intervals is a self-portrait in absentia. The shapes of the neon tubes were molded against the contours of the artist’s body...

...Due to the sculpture’s popularity and fragility, the practice of
fabricating replicas for temporary exhibitions was developed. Loan
agreements required potential borrowers to meet four criterion. First,
artist Bruce Nauman required that the original neon must be in existence
and in working order. Second, the current owner of the artwork must
agree to the loan before a replica exhibition copy is fabricated. Third,
the credit line for the loaned artwork would specify that the work on
view is an exhibition copy and acknowledge
the owner of the original. The final criteria required the destruction
of the copy at the conclusion of the exhibition. Borrowers were asked
to provide photographic documentation that the destruction had taken
place.

Excerpt from:

The Conservation of Bruce Nauman’s Neon Templates of the Left Half of My Body at Ten Inch Intervals (1966) via The Glass House

Jikken Kōbō (Experimental Workshop) was founded in Tokyo in 1951,
against the backdrop of a country traumatized by Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
and suffering from postwar austerity measures. This determinedly
interdisciplinary group of 14 artists, musicians, choreographers and
poets orientated themselves towards the pre-war European and American
avant-gardes. Its members, many of whom were self-taught, worked
individually or in groups, and their guiding interests included the
piano work of John Cage, Martha Graham’s choreography, and the sculpture
of Alexander Calder and Isamu Noguchi. Active for about seven years,
they operated mostly outside of museum spaces and distanced themselves
from the academic discourses around musique concrète and
electro-acoustic composition. One of Jikken Kobo’s co-founders,
Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, likened the workshop to ‘Bauhaus without a
building’. [Excerpt text from Frieze Magazine]

Satellite photos of Earth’s artificial lights at night form a
luminescent landscape. But researcher Chris Elvidge of NOAA and
colleagues from the University of Colorado and the University of Denver
realized that they could also illuminate something much darker: the
magnitude of human poverty. By comparing the amount of light in a
particular area and its known population, they realized that they could
infer the percentage of people who are able to afford electricity and
the level of government spending on infrastructure development. This
allowed them to extrapolate levels of human development—a measure of
well-being that includes such factors as income, life expectancy and
literacy.

Their Night Light Development Index (NLDI) uses a composite of
cloudless night images taken by Air Force satellites. They found that
the NLDI (below) measured human development with uncanny accuracy. The
results closely correlated with conventional indices and in some cases
even surpassed them. “The NLDI helps us get at the spatial patterns that
you can’t see with traditional economic indices,” Elvidge says. “For
instance, most nations report their GDP at the country or province
level, but the NLDI can reveal subregional patterns, down to the
one-kilometer scale.” The index also provides information on some
countries, mostly in Northern Africa and the Middle East, for which
reliable economic data are simply unavailable. This text is excerpt from Smithsonian Magazine [link]

Featured audience (from left to right): MarielVilleré, Lydia Ross, and Irina Chernyakova

ART SHOW and EVENTS by Art, Culture and Technology graduate students at MIT. Exploring silence, ambivalence, non-knowledge and psychodynamic interaction. Featuring diagrams for living, Sausage Tank, a signifying baseball cap, and dynamic video displays. May 25 through June 10 at the former Salvation Army thrift store, 328 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, Massachusetts.